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SHEBA ARTS ON THE RADIO!

10/26/2023

We were invited to be on Somos con Cecilia Ramos, the first Spanish-speaking radio station in the

Northwest of England.

On Tuesday 24 October, our Executive Producer and resident Spanish speaker, Nuria, was invited to be on the radio show Somos on 96.9 ALL FM. Somos is the first Spanish radio broadcast in the Northwest of England, and is hosted by Cecilia Ramos. Nuria joined Cecilia and singer Nelson Gómez to talk about our work at Sheba Arts!

Nuria spoke about the history of Sheba Arts, our current projects including Haideh & Nejad, the production of La Nagualita as part of #ShebaFest23 – made by Guatemalan artist Sally Hilton –, and how you can get involved by following our social media and subscribing to our newsletter!

Somos works to promote awareness of and participation in Spanish and Latin American culture in the Northwest of England.

You can listen back to Tuesday's show here: https://www.mixcloud.com/allfm969/drive-time-somos-con-cecilia-ramos-tuesday-24-october-2023/

Follow Somos, the first Spanish radio station in the Northwest:

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"LA BOMBA!" - SALLY HILTON'S EXPERIENCE OF WORKING WITH SHEBA ARTS

8/22/2023

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As our third talent development artist, Sally worked closely with Sheba Arts to produce her show, La Nagualita. The culmination of this work was shared in the closing event of Sheba Festival 2023 at Instituto Cervantes.

Whilst the dust has settled and the jaguar mask has been put away, Sally’s work is by no means over… we caught up with her to hear about how she found La Nagualita and discover what her next steps might be.

How was your experience of working with the Sheba Arts team?

I learnt so much from this experience working with a bigger team. I learnt about leadership, team management and project planning. I realised how important it is to have someone in the team who is dedicated to these tasks. For example: ACE funding application and process; timeline making with deadlines and tasks; contract writing and management; how to use google drive folders and documents; elements on budget management like receipts keeping & invoices process; accounts management.

How was your experience of working with other artists to create your own work – would you do it again?

I really enjoyed working with the other artists and sharing my culture with them. We shared skills and knowledge with each other. I felt there was a great connection between all the dancers and myself, and the working environment was really good and safe. Everyone felt like they could contribute with artistic ideas and suggestions. I feel we all had different approaches and could learn a lot from each other; for example, I learned lots of new dance styles from Miss Fuego, and lots of recording and editing skills from Jova. Johnny and Su were also great, as they contributed lots of ideas and knowledge of movement and dance for the show.

This is the first time you’ve worked with a bigger team; did you learn anything, and did you feel supported?

I learned so much from working with a bigger team, especially surrounding leadership and project planning. I realised how important it is to have someone in the team who is dedicated to tasks such as funding applications, timeline making, and administrative support. This project has contributed a lot to my artistic skills. It was the first time I worked collaboratively with artists from refugee and migrant LGBTQ+ communities, and I gained confidence and skills in costume design and choreography.

Do you feel this project helped to grow your network and connections in the local LGBTQ+ community?

Yes, absolutely. I learned a lot from the artists themselves as they belong to the LGBTQ+ community and their experiences in Manchester, and I also connected with other groups. For example, Miss Fuego introduced me to a vogue dancing group in Manchester, where I attended a couple of workshops with them and learnt about vogue culture, dance and catwalk moves.

What would you like to focus your career development on next? Which areas are you most interested in?

I would love to continue exploring the 3 areas: dance, storytelling and costume design as I see my work is a combination of them all. I particularly think I need more support and learning to improve my dance skills (dance lessons, theatrical dance, choreography mentoring) and costume design and making. I’d love to learn about pattern cutting and making.

Any other comments?

My experience with Sheba Arts was LA BOMBA!*

*the bomb, i.e. very good.

Watch the interview highlights below!

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Creating place: in conversation with Beena Nouri

5/10/2023

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Creating Place is a ground-breaking project we co-produce with the Turnpike Gallery in Leigh. This project brings people from diverse backgrounds together to share skills and experiences and creates dialogues . In this post you learn more about this project from Beena Nouri, the main facilitator of the project.

For 12 weeks Beena worked with migrant community in Leigh town centre, in kingsleigh community centre. Each week the participants explored a different material or art form. The work in now on display at the Turnpike Gallery as a co-created, collaborative exhibition. Participants made clay tiles which Beena has put up as a wall, fitting together everyone's different designs into one big image. The explored weaving through making baskets, bowls and textiles.
Beena reflected that these workshops allow people to come together and do something creative. It isn't just what's being made that matters, it's the process. There's a lot of chat in the workshops, people asking each other about ‘where is the food bank?’ or ‘I didn't know there was a gallery here, where is it?’. This artistic space opened up a soft and welcoming environment for people to get together, giving space for people to talk and build their own community.
As a community facilitator and architectural designer, Beena has a unique understanding of what creating a place can mean. Beena studied an MA in Architecture and for her the combination of architecture and art is a powerful tool to redefine space for the communities it serves. Through her masters and her work as a community facilitator she is learning constantly about how people experience space. In the future she would love to put this thinking into practice and create a community centre with refugees and asylum seekers co-designed to suit the communities needs.
She also highlighted the way in which refugee and asylum communities are often forced into repurposed or clinical spaces. The current hotel accommodation being a clear example of this, we spoke about how cruel it is to expect people to make a home in a place where you cannot even mark the wall or cook a meal. In hotels you can't have any ownership over your own space or what you can do in that space.
Creating Place is about opening up a space where people can make things and not just inhabit them. Through this project we, as a community, can all come together and collectively make something new.
The exhibition launched in July and will be open until 16th September. The celebratory event will be on 15th September at the Turnpike Gallery.

Post by Maddie Wakeling

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more about poetry

3/27/2023

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Finding Voice And Identity

Through Writing and Poetry

with

Maryam Alsaeid

Listen to this episode to hear about some struggles of being a poet and a writer but also for the other beautiful and fascinating sides of it. A talented poet and a practicing pharmacist Maryam Alsaeid joins our podcast for this episode to talk about her creative journey and the things that she does as a poet.

Maryam also talks about the importance of being vulnerable. She took some inspiration from Brene Brown for her vulnerable rumble sessions that she shares on her social profiles.

Maryam creates workshops and she currently leads some of them for our writing project that we are doing in collaboration with Commonword that started some time ago.
Head over to our projects page to read more about it.

Listen to our full conversation below or search us on Spotify.

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importance of communities

1/18/2023

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Exploring The Importance Of Creating Our Own Communities

With

Gulcin Bulut

In this episode, we are joined by a new guest speaker.

Gulcin Bulut is a psychotherapist, singer,

frame drum player and a creative producer.

And in this episode, we had a very insightful conversation,

as Gulcin has told us more about the North West Turkish Community Association,

how it was formed and her contributions as one of the core founders.

We also talked about an important link between music and our mental health.

Our mental state can be affected by music and also by the way we interact with it.

Listen to the episode below and let us know what you think.

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importance of writing

12/16/2022

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Exploring The Importance Of Writing

with

Hadisa Hussain Afzaly

In our second episode, we had a special conversation with a poet Hadisa Hussain.

Together we’ve explored the impact that our environment has on our potential and our comfort. Hadisa has also emphasised the importance of writing and keeping a record of the current events happening in society. Such records will impact the future and will help the future generation to understand all the events that people are experiencing in the current days. It’s such an interesting conversation!

Listen Now

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Podcast

11/3/2022

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In our podcast we explore migration, wealth of different cultures, different art forms and just have conversations with different interesting people.

Our first episode, we have a special guest Beena Nouri who is an architectural designer in Manchester. In 2019, she received a commission to create a painting for our Celebrating Diversity Festival. She then took part in our co-training programme and became a valuable member of Sheba Arts.

In our second episode, we had a special conversation with a poet Hadisa Hussain. Together we’ve explored the impact that our environment has on our potential and our comfort. Hadisa has also emphasised the importance of writing and keeping a record of the current events happening in society. Such records will impact the future and will help the future generation to understand all the events that people are experiencing in the current days. It’s such an interesting conversation!

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My Experience of Edinburgh Fringe 2022

8/30/2022

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Does Edinburgh Festival Fringe, as one of the largest festivals of arts and culture in the world, fully reflect the UK’s cultural and demographic diversity?
This year, Sheba Arts offered three days of free accommodation in Edinburgh to eight female and non-binary performance artists and theatre makers from refugee and migrant backgrounds who could not afford to attend the festival otherwise. The call was made on the 26 July on social media and across our networks. We received emails and messages asking about the details of the offer. People asked if we could provide transport or travel expenses or allowances for food?
We would have liked to have been able to offer travel allowances for each individual but, as a small arts organisation with a very limited reserves, we were unable to offer support with transportation and food. As a result, only four artists made it to Edinburgh. They all have jobs and a steady income. This is something we will reflect upon in case we make this offer again.
I didn’t have a high expectation of the festival considering its re-emergence after two years of lockdown and with nearly twenty thousand daily cases of the virus still occurring. I had been to the festival in 2018-2019 and although I enjoyed it, the lack of diversity overshadowed that enjoyment.
During our stay, we managed to see a few international shows including The Princess Pyunggang by the Bibimbad Theatre from South Korea. A play about Korean culture and history shown through folk music, puppetry, and dance. It was inspiring and made me want to learn more about Korean history. I loved the performer's personalities, their dedication and effort.

Of course, we all know it’s not easy to take your show to Edinburgh. Yet the fact is that some 4500 performers make it there not just from the UK but from all parts of the world. So, there must be other reasons for this lack of diversity. On our last day in Edinburgh while walking on the Royal Mile, we bumped into a group of young black artists from Nottingham who had brought their show, The Conversation. The young director, Syania Shaharuddin and her team had this amazing idea: they displayed a map of the world for the passers-by to pin their location on the map (I understood it as your place of origin, so I pinned on my country of birth). Within an hour or so of holding that map, this is what the picture looked like!

In 2020, we hosted five seminars on different subjects including the lack of diversity in the arts, where practitioners from BAME, or Global Majority, discussed the issues in arts and culture (https://www.shebaarts.com/research-learning.html). Lack of resources and development opportunities for the Global Majority artists and grassroots arts organisations were considered the two devils that caused the sector not to grow equally. When I started to make theatre in 2017, as an emerging performer, I found the industry far from nurturing and that’s the main reason Sheba Arts came into existence.
During the pandemic, Arts Council England pushed the boat out and supported many Global Majority artists with R&D grants, including a few emerging theatre makers with whom we have a working relationship. However, the new changes in Grantium and the new application form, meant most of these artists were unable to apply for a second grant to tour their shows. Add to this the fact that venues closed their doors and the sum total was that the pandemic made it even harder to get into venues.
Regardless of the pandemic, it is my impression that Global Majority artists even the most established ones are generally advised not to go for bigger grants as, the advice goes, it reduces our chances of success. A few years back, I saw a fabulous one-white-person show at HOME which used 3D technology. The show toured to many places including LA, Australia and Edinburgh. During an online workshop with the artist a few weeks later, when I asked how much her show cost, she gave me the unbelievable figure of 270k. One can easily comprehend the reason why Global Majority artists can’t go very far if 270K is what it takes!
I am not sure if there are detailed statistics showing the number of theatre compamies or arts organisations that received grants during and immediately post-pandemic. However, according to Artsprofessional.co.uk, only 15% of Global Majority arts organisations across the UK received funding from the Cultural Recovery Fund. If true, this is disappointing. If the 15% statistic also applies to Manchester, then considering the fact that 33% of the Manchester population are non-white, this would be doubly disappointing.
‘These conversations have been happening since the 70s’ said one of our panellists in 2020. Well, I am not old enough to know about this and I was born in another country. But I feel there is an urgent need for change. The demand for change has become the driving force behind the growing cultural movement across the country that is asking for systemic change and I am hoping that by joining forces we will be able to create a more equitable and nurturing society.

To read more about the lack of diversity in Edinburgh visit:
https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/ongoing-lack-of-edfringe-diversity-disheartening-say-leading-creatives
Fereshteh Mozaffari
Artistic Director

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In conversation with Chinnar Najib

1/24/2022

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Chinnar Najib is one of the amazing women with whom we had the pleasure of working since the beginning of the pandemic. Chinnar is based in Stockport and is originally from Kurdistan, Iraq. She has worked as a volunteer with many charities and advisory organisations and she has been managing Culture Bridge since 2018. In 2020, Culture Briidge joined Sheba Arts as an associate member and in 2021, became constituted as an unincorporated organisation.
Read our brief interview with Chinnar about her experience working with us.

Please introduce Culture Bridge
Culture Bridge was established in 2018 to support Kurdish community and promote Kurdish arts and culture in Greater Manchester. Our aims are to build trust, enable collaboration and create benefit. We work with people seeking asylum, refugees, and migrants; to ensure that their voices are heard, they can integrate, and feel included in the community. We want to bring all cultures together and create some amazing spaces.

When did you start working with Sheba Arts ?
In April 2019, we participated in Sheba Art’s 'Garden of Babylon' project. Then the same year, we joined the celebration of the refugee week project, “ Celebrating Diversity festival,” in Stockport. We became a Sheba Arts associate group at the beginning of lockdown in 2020.

What projects did you do in partnership with Sheba Arts? What type of support did you receive?
With mentoring support from Sheba Arts we received our first funding from Lankelly Chase Foundation and Stockport Local Fund for two pojects in 2021. We also received mentoring on project management throughout:

Sharing & Caring project on Zoom. 16 sessions of arts and crafts with 25 women from different backgrounds.
Women’s Cooking project, in collaboration with St Peter's Parish centre

As a community leader, I’ve learned how to improve my leadership skills and build my admin and community-collaboration skills . I really enjoyed working with Sheba Arts and I appreciate their support very much.

What is culture bridge doing now? What are your plans for future
We currently have our Culture Bridge women’s multicultural workshop, “ Our Stories,” funded by the Stockport ARC & gallery Centre. The second project is “Connect” in partnership project with Hazel Grove St Peter’s Church, funded by All Churches Trust. We’ll start our new project funded by the Stockport CAN Local funds in early March.
Our plan for future is to improve our skills and our community group through more training, and collaborations within the community groups in Stockport and in the wider community in Manchester area. We hope that we’ll be able to offer more support to the refugee, migrant, and asylum-seeking people to integrate into the community. At the same time, to build strong bridges of communication through sharing our multicultural art activities and experiences.
Sheba Arts supported our work in the past two years; we appreciate their help and guidance very much and wish them All the Best for the future.

Chinnar Najib
Director
https://www.facebook.com/culture.bridge.3
Instagram@culturebridgemcr
Twitter:@culturebridgeuk

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ABOUT CATS ON THE RUN

6/6/2021

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Cats On The Run is a participatory project funded by Lankelly Chase Foundation, produced by Sheba Arts and RAPAR, in collaboration with Culture Bridge, Kanlungan Concercium, and SWAN. Working with 22 undocumented people from Greater Manchester including migrant workers, asylum seekers, and those who fell through the cracks because of Covid-19 and the lockdown, a team of seven artists, community workers, and creative helpers, supported the participants to create a piece of work and express themselves using creative tools. This essay sheds lights on the process of the project, and the socio-economic challenges these people are facing in the UK. It is adapted from a report by Dr Rhetta Moran.
'No project activity takes place in a vacuum. On the contrary, outside of this project but coincident with its timeframe (August 2020 – March 2021), socioeconomic, cultural, political and legal developments, framed as reactions to the emergence of Covid-19 related directly to this projects’ participants: migrant communities most marginalised by Covid-19.
The first lockdown began on 23rd March 2020. At this time, Minister Kevin Foster responded to a question about what measures had been taken to ensure those in the country would be able to seek medical help by asserting: “No one should fear accessing medical advice from our superb NHS due to an immigration reason.”
In some places, hotels housing asylum seekers during the coronavirus pandemic were attacked and a few weeks later, the Home Affairs Committee published its report on Home Office preparedness for COVID-19. This report highlighted many issues of concern relating to displaced people: the quality or levels of accommodation, personal allowances, safeguarding and risk assessments, impact on mental health, lack of provision of internet to enable people to access information, consult GPs etc, lack of provision of sanitising and other products and zero increase in allowances to enable people to buy these products themselves.
It was during this period that Boris Johnson was compelled to intervene in the case of Mercy Baguma, who had lost her Leave to Remain status (visa) and job. She was found dead in a flat in Glasgow next to her one-year-old son. In that case, very widely reported, the asylum application had been pending for the child’s father who, following the mother’s death, was now the boy’s sole carer. A week later, the Home Office ‘work’ that directly interfered in the lives of hundreds of thousands of displaced people, including children in families, was condemned by the Public Accounts Committee.They revealed a myriad of humanity-denying actions authorised through Home Office powers and leaving major question marks over a multitude of migration related decisions.
During the course of our third month, alongside other long established migrant and human organisations, we became involved in vigils commemorating lives destroyed by the hostile environment. The government mooted the idea of putting floating barriers in the English Channel to stop asylum seekers crossing to the UK, and using nets to stop dinghies. Widely reported, these announcements induced panic and fear throughout our migrant populations and the participants in this project. It stimulated extensive discussions about the impact of such announcements on the mental health and well-being of our communities in general and in particular the most vulnerable: undocumented people. Reports of the Home Office attempts to hire a private risk management company to provide a rapid review of initial accommodation for single adult asylum seekers - effectively outsourcing the monitoring of compliance with public health guidelines to prevent the transmission of Covid 19 for people housed in the asylum system - contributed further to the overall impression that, as far as the government is concerned, migrant people without status in the UK can be exempted from the public health standards that should apply to all.
By November 2020, organisations who had been working with us to secure the involvement of some of their undocumented contacts and through Status Now For All Campaing, spoke against the government intention to allow their private contractor SERCO to resume evictions into destitution during lockdown. At the same time, evidence was emerging of the alarming rise in backlog of asylum cases, even though the numbers of applications had been falling. For those who are undocumented, the knowledge that people were now waiting for over six months for an initial response to their applications to become regularised through the asylum system told them that, even when able to submit an application they may still be waiting for a further and extensive period before experiencing any real shift in their material circumstances or sense of safety.
From December onwards, moving into the second half of the project’s timeframe, the media began to become dominated by the question of the imminent availability of vaccines against COVID. However, for undocumented people, the multiplicity of barriers to their access remained. Countless people have been turned away from their GP surgeries when they tried to register, being told they needed proof of ID, of status, of address, or “we don’t deal with illegal immigrants”.
In early February Privacy International’s new report revealed the extent to which Britain is turning into a migration surveillance regime and, specifically, revealed that the current British Government is in the process of developing a ‘Status Checking’ Project which could result in any person on British soil being able to be assessed, presumably at the touch of a screen, for their status. This raised the fear that if people approached health systems for vaccination they might become detected for removal or deportation. Out of this realisation, an Early Day Motion #1442 was created through which, for the first time in British history and in direct response to the challenges posed by Covid, British Members of Parliament formalised a call for Indefinite Leave to Remain for all those undocumented and in legal process.
Later in this penultimate project month, news reached our participants of the Government’s intention to remove Osime Brown, a 22 year old man with learning disabilities and a PTSD diagnosis, to Jamaica. This was followed closely by the revelation that a new network of immigration detention centres for women was being quietly planned by the Home Office. contrary to previous pledges to reform the system and reduce the number of vulnerable people held.
Finally, as the last month of our project closed, the Government announcement of its intention to conduct “the biggest overhaul of the UK’s asylum system in decades” was met with widespread derision, summed up as: “based on false premises - particularly the actual availability of legal routes – and tears apart the principle of the right to claim asylum.”

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SHEBA ARTS ON THE RADIO!

We were invited to be on Somos con Cecilia Ramos, the first Spanish-speaking radio station in the

Northwest of England.

For any listeners of the show, if you want to get involved with us at Sheba Arts, subscribe to our

newsletter:

"LA BOMBA!" - SALLY HILTON'S EXPERIENCE OF WORKING WITH SHEBA ARTS

Watch the interview highlights below!

Creating place: in conversation with Beena Nouri

more about poetry

Finding Voice And Identity

Through Writing and Poetry

with

Maryam Alsaeid

importance of communities

Exploring The Importance Of Creating Our Own Communities

With

Gulcin Bulut

importance of writing

Exploring The Importance Of Writing

with

Hadisa Hussain Afzaly

Podcast

My Experience of Edinburgh Fringe 2022

In conversation with Chinnar Najib

ABOUT CATS ON THE RUN

Archives

Categories

We were invited to be on Somos con Cecilia Ramos, the first Spanish-speaking radio station in the​Northwest of England.

For any listeners of the show, if you want to get involved with us at Sheba Arts, subscribe to our ​newsletter:

Watch the interview highlights below!

Finding Voice And Identity ​ Through Writing and Poetry with ​ Maryam Alsaeid

​Exploring The Importance Of Creating Our Own Communities With ​Gulcin Bulut ​​

Exploring The Importance Of Writingwith​Hadisa Hussain Afzaly

Archives

Categories

We were invited to be on Somos con Cecilia Ramos, the first Spanish-speaking radio station in the

Northwest of England.

For any listeners of the show, if you want to get involved with us at Sheba Arts, subscribe to our

newsletter:

Finding Voice And Identity

Through Writing and Poetry

with

Maryam Alsaeid

Exploring The Importance Of Creating Our Own Communities

With

Gulcin Bulut

Exploring The Importance Of Writing

with

Hadisa Hussain Afzaly